How They Made Me and Earl and the Dying Girl's Mini-Movies

The word-cloud for Me and Earl and the Dying Girl looks something like this: Heartfelt. Smart. Funny. Gut-wrenching. Beautiful. Precocious. And on and on and on. It's the kind of movie that's made to charm folks at film festivals, so it isn't surprising that it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Coming-of-age movies about well-meaning slackers who befriend girls dying of leukemia tend to do that.

But while the special sauce of Me and Earl, hitting select cities this weekend, may be its mix of insight, humor, and heartbreak, its secret ingredient is the Gaines/Jackson Film Catalog. You see, the movie revolves around the life of Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), a high school senior who spends most of his spare time making parodies of (and/or homages to) classic films with his "co-worker" (he doesn't like to call people friends), Earl Jackson (RJ Cyler).

All told Greg and Earl have made 42 short films with titles like Eyes Wide Butt, 2:48 Cowboy, My Dinner with Andre the Giant, but when Greg and Earl try to make a film for Rachel (Olivia Cooke) as she battles cancer, it proves much more demanding than just whipping up some sock puppets for A Sockwork Orange.

The biggest challenge off-screen, though, was making those student films. Much of the Gaines/Jackson catalog is shown in bits and pieces throughout the movie, so a second unit was created to make short films that jibed with director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's dreamlike visual style while also looking like the work of two Pittsburgh teenagers. That unit, lead by directors/animators Edward Bursch and Nathan O. Marsh, made the 21 stop-motion animated and live-action works seen in the movie, including the short the boys make for Rachel. (They also created another animation—of a moose stomping a chipmunk—after production wrapped.) Here's everything you need to know about how they did it.

The Mini-Movies Are Strongly Influenced by Martin Scorsese

In choosing which films Greg and Earl would pay homage to, Gomez-Rejon saw an opportunity to give props to his favorite directors like Martin Scorsese, for whom Gomez-Rejon was once a personal assistant. But with limited screen time available, he had to be selective. "Alfonso had a list we could choose from and he was super passionate about the choices, too. Deciding what movies it was going to be was, like, a process," Marsh says. "Scorsese was meaningful in his artistic development and he wanted that to be part of Greg's world." Astute film aficionados will notice a movie called Grumpy Cul-de-Sacs instead of Mean Streets, but the Scorsese influence goes beyond that. "Alfonso was telling us that some weekends he would watch movies with Martin Scorsese," Bursch says. "I think some of the ones Scorsese introduced him to were the ones we ended up making parodies of, which I just thought was so cool."

The Pun-Laden Titles Come From a Mix of Naiveté and Genius

One of the many highlights of Me and Earl is seeing the riffs the boys make on classic movie titles. Most come from Jesse Andrews' book Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, on which the movie is based. But, Bursch notes, he and Marsh offered a few. "I think Nate had some of the best ones, including Senior Citizen Cane," he adds. Figuring out those titles was tough, though, because they had to be smart, but not too smart since they're coming from the minds of teenagers. "It was like they had to be bad to be funny, but you don't want them to be just awful," Marsh says. "The sort of tone for the shorts themselves was like, 'Make them bad, but not like bad bad.'"

The Mini-Movies Were Shot During Breaks in Filming

Me and Earl was shot in just 25 days. That's a tight schedule to begin with, and any time Marsh and Bursch needed one of the film's main actors for a mini-movie, they needed to grab them between takes. That meant throwing gear in a van with the actors, rushing to a location, getting the shot and then bringing everything back to the set. When they didn't have actors, they would make animated films. "During the production we weren't entirely separated from the main unit," Marsh says. "We had our own little office where we were crashing through our arts-and-crafts world."

Some of the Footage Was Shot by Greg

In the film Greg is shown making a stop-motion film with an iPhone—that's a bit of a cheat, it was actually done with a DSLR. But some of the movies-within-the-movie were shot on an old 16mm Bolex camera, and some of the footage was shot by Greg (Mann) during production. "We thought maybe Greg's dad in the movie might've had this old camera from years ago and given it to Greg and now Greg's picking it up and shooting short films on that," Bursch says. "Later down the line Greg gets a new Nikon DSLR and then later down the line he's shooting things on his iPhone as well. So it was a few different cameras we shot stuff on, we didn’t just make it look that way in post-production."

They Made 21 Mini-Movies—And Nearly All Made the Final Cut

It might seem like overkill to make 21 shorts during a feature film shoot that only took 25 days, but very little of what Bursch and Marsh made ended up on the cutting room floor. "In one way or the other, even if you have to squint to find them, I think most of them made the cut," Bursch says. "Most of them are seen in this montage in the first third of the movie and some are seen on TV screens or laptop screens throughout the rest of the film."

They Showed Rachel's Short During Filming ... And People Cried

Mild spoilers: Greg belabors it throughout the film—does finally make a movie for Rachel as she battles her illness. It has three acts. The first is a collection of testimonials from Rachel's classmates in the style of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. The next is a stop-motion scene that's an homage to Charles and Ray Eames's movies. The final act is an abstract animation of shapes and colors meant to convey things Greg can't say to Rachel. It's all set to Brian Eno's "The Big Ship." Gomez-Rejon didn't see the final cut until the morning he filmed the scene in which Greg shows the movie to Rachel. The director bawled his eyes out, then played it during every take of that final scene. "I was on set," Bursch says. "It was a really cool night of shooting because they had the Brian Eno music playing during the scene and people got pretty emotional and you could just tell that it was going to turn out well."